That's exactly what I would suggest. I know the project mechanic was changed some time ago because of some vocal people that resented to give fully developed planets new orders every couple of times when a project came to a close, but while that is only a bit annoying (not for me, I must say), the current system with auto repeating projects is downright harmful if you forget to check on your planets every turn: in case of "normal" projects like Aid Research you lose production if you have to cancel the project because you can now build something else for what you waited by initiating the project, but in case of Station Garrison if you station too many legions you cannot retrieve them anymore and they are lost for war.

I agree the best solution is to introduce an option to specify for every project whether it should be repeated or not. But Stardock seems more than reluctant to make UI changes (like more sorting options in the various lists, an indicator how far a ship can move, changing the default auto improvement  setting to "only when all tiles are full", giving a choice at colonizing a planet where to put the colony capital and so on ...). It's not clear to me what makes that so difficult but it really must be very, very difficult

As to disappearing duratium: I hope that (and all other occurences of resources being deducted every turn instead of once) will be fixed soon, because such a problem would ruin the game for me.

I'm not an "ideal" player that uses his calculator every turn to find out the best actions. So I'm surely more vulnerable than such an ideal player. In my current game as Onyx on gifted everything at around turn 250 the Kif are pressing me hard (AI seems much more coordinated than in earlier versions of the game) an have even attacked my homeworld twice. I could only repel them by converting some spare citiziens to generals and station them on my homeworld the turn before the attack. The second time they brought only 3 legions against my 6, but had an attack advantage of 19:6 (or so, the 19 is accurate, the 6 I cannot remember exactly). I still could defend my planet, if barely. The first attack with even chances ( was something like 12:12) I won also, but more clearly.

So I wouldn't say that stationing legions is useless. And apart from the current mechanics every game element should have it's use. If not, then there is something wrong with game design. 

Currently, ground combat is unbalanced, and you are correct that it doesn't seem to make any sense to station garrisons on your planets. 

In any strategy game, from RTS to TBS, it is necessary to provide a significant defender advantage, otherwise the game is boring. If every matchup of Starcraft was simply a Zergling rush, no one would play it. In Civ 4 and 5, there were defender advantages, which is what made it possible to do things such as build wonders and pursue culture victories. 

GC could use some work in this department, imo. Military starbases should have their effective range increased, I think. But we're talking about ground combat. I think station garrisons should be separate from legions. You should be able to build them independent of having any legions in your global pool. They would be much cheaper, but the trade off is they are permanently stationed on defense and can never be moved. 

Hm, that sounds like a good idea I didn't think of yet (but is no option for building up a defence when you see the enemy fleet one turn before it arrives ). One more reason why the ground invasion and ground defence system should be revisited by the devs.

Station legion in one turn is not much of a winning option, either.  You can summon multiple legions at once by building one transport.  A cargo hull, transport module, maybe a warp drive?  Rush buy would set you back 1000bc, maybe?  Unless your shipyard is dead next turn.  People design dedicated sensor ships to avoid that sort of thing. 

I use them sensor ships myself, but I cannot do everything at the same time ... (at least not in this game )

Ship maintenance is somehow off:

- All ship designs show a maintenance of 1 in the popup that appears when moving the mouse over the list on the left side

- The "Selected Ship Details" window on the upper right shows always 0 maintenance

- When I go to "Govern Civilization" and put the mouse over "Ship Maintenance" then the maintenance costs for individual ships are bigger than 0 or 1 (in my case 2 for the three individual ships that are in the list).

the ship graveyard is the weak defended anomaly your talking about. they turned it off for crusade. or else in one of the crusade earlier patches anyways. Sexy leader anomalies on nexus mods turns them back on, couple other mods do too, but they tend to be bundled with a lot of other stuff.

you would have to design a new anomaly type or I guess edit the existing ones to make some variety. i think it may be easier to code a check for average tech age or something, or set up some defined turn times that unlock harder anomalies than it would be to calculate the avg str of all civs. 

A timed galactic event that replaces anomalies could also give a warning/ details and stuff so it doesn't catch players off guard.

going back to one of your other points/ topics, it would be nice if the repeat projects was a toggle type button on the planet screen or in the governor menu. default off.

Colonizing a Precursor Quarantine world gave me the colonization event for that and I chose the pragmatic option that would increase my pop cap by 6. But nothing happened, pop cap remained at 3.

Do you have the requisite resource to upgrade it?  If not, it won't show the upgrade arrow.

Just was able to sell the Yor Novel Harvesting for a good price ...

And another QoL thing: when you click on "Shipyard idle" and are taken to the shipyard screen show which ship was just finished building.

E. g. if I build a colonizer I unsually don't want to build a second one right after to not drain my pop. In the moment I have to leave the shipyard screen to check which ship was ejected and then go back again.